Many organizations today use a collection of Business Intelligence (BI) tools and applications to allow experts to gather information from a variety of sources, analyze the information, and share the information with managers and staff. Large business organizations include different divisions that will typically use different data sources to store and manage information.
Database federation is a technique for aggregating multiple data sources into a single virtual data source and creating a logical model to allow logical queries of the federated data source.
In a federated database environment, it is crucial to support new data sources to meet customer requirements in a timely manner. With the advent of cloud computing, there are more data sources to be supported by business intelligence tools.
Currently, the industry's answer to this problem is to provide an API for new data sources. However, most of the API's are targeted only to connectivity and do not allow leveraging the analytic capabilities of the BI tools.
Many computers provide products for implementing database federation capability. For example, Oracle Corporation provides a Business Intelligence Server (OBIS) that is a highly scalable, highly efficient query and analysis server that integrates data via sophisticated query federation capabilities from multiple relational, unstructured, OLAP, and pre-packaged application sources, whether Oracle or non-Oracle.
The OBIS exposes its services through standard ODBC and JDBC-compliant interfaces. Clients of the OBIS see a logical schema view independent of the source physical database schemas. OBIS clients submit “Logical” SQL, which ultimately gets translated by the server to native, source-specific data source query languages such as SQL and MDX. Intermediate processing to calculate complex business metrics and integrate multiple data sources occurs within the OBIS Execution Engine. The OBIS infrastructure includes facilities such as session and query management, cancellation, statistics logging, monitoring, and other server administration functions.
The addition of a new data source to OBIS requires adding additional code to an existing version. Typically new versions of OBIS are released that integrate new data sources into the federated database.